Saturday, September 28, 2013

Just the Facts not only lets you monitor and alert on facts from individual web service, but also lets you combine them into calculated facts. This post will step through creating a single fact, "Combined Reach," that collects the follower counts from a number of social networks.

Let's say I have multiple social presences, spanning Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube. But what I really want to track day by day is my overall social presence.

After I've signed up for Just the Facts and installed the Chrome plugin, I begin by navigating to each of my social networks and activating the plugin. Let's start with my total number of Twitter followers:

Subscribe to Twitter Followers

I click on the hilighted Followers field to select it and click Subscribe. I then click Authorize app to give permission for Just the Facts to make API calls to my Twitter account.

Twitter Permissions Dialog

That's it! My Twitter Followers count will now be tracked daily and emailed to me.

Subscription to Twitter Followers

I can follow the exact same steps for my other social network, capturing facts for Facebook Friends, Pinterest Followers, YouTube Subscribers, and Google+ circles:

Facebook Friends

Pinterest Followers

YouTube Subscribers

Now I can create what we call a Calculated Fact by selecting the newly created facts and clicking the Combine into New Fact icon.

Combine into New Fact

Let's call our new Fact "Total Reach" and click Save.

Defining "Total Reach"

We can then edit our newly created Fact to set a Target value:

Editing a Combined Fact

Setting a Target

This lets us track progress towards the target every day. We'll also receive an email notification when the target is reached.

Email Notification

These are just some of the social networks supported by Just the Facts - others include LinkedIn and Google+. Click to see the full list of supported services, and remember that more are being added all the time.

What additional services would you like to see and what facts are you interested in tracking? Let us know in the comments below.